Right around this time last year, the Mets went on some kind of streak. It started out as seven in a row. It grew to 11 out of 14, and then to 19 out of 25. A week later, they started a new one: eight in a row, nine out of 10, 10 out of 12. It’s how you piece together a 31-11 record over a 42-game span in August and September.

It’s how, and why, everything that happened for them in 2015 happened at all.

This is what the Mets search for now: a streak, any kind of streak, any kind of message their pulse is still working and the final two months of 2016 will be something other than a long slog toward nowhere. It’s how they have conducted their trade-deadline business. It’s how they act.

It’s even how they talk.

“You win seven in a row, eight in a row, you’re right back in it,” Terry Collins said Tuesday, before the Mets crushed the Yankees 7-1 behind Jacob deGrom’s arm and Alejandro De Aza’s bat (honest).

Of course he’s right, and of course that’s the fundamental hope that fuels all baseball seasons: the notion you could be starting a 10-game winning streak tonight, or tomorrow, or the day after, the idea you can turn your season inside out and upside down with one jolt of good fortune.

Everyone thinks they can be the ’69 Mets or the ’07 Rockies down the stretch of a season. Hell, it was the notion they could just hop on a treadmill and speed past the teams ahead that deluded the Yankees’ brass north of Brian Cashman into waiting until the very end to finally join Cashman’s plan of re-jiggering the Yankees’ business model.

It’s an easy trick to fall prey to.

And if you are the Mets, who saw their record swell from 52-50 on July 31 last year to 59-50 a week later to 71-56 on Aug. 27 and 83-61 by the weekend after Labor Day … well, it’s hard to shake loose from possibilities. Especially when possibilities are all you have left.

Even if all you’ve had for the better part of a month are one-game winning streaks. Eight of them in all, including the one they’ll bring across the RFK to Yankee Stadium Wednesday.

“It’s an instant recharge of the battery,” Mets newcomer Jay Bruce said earlier Tuesday, “playing games that matter.”

Playing meaningful games hasn’t been the issue for the Mets, at least not yet. Winning them, that’s another story. The Nats have moved a good week ahead of them in the NL East, it seems the Dodgers are about to put a firm lockdown on the first wild card (if they don’t wind up passing the Giants out West, that is), but there remains an opening for one team — the Marlins, Mets, Cardinals or Pirates — to elevate itself to pole position for the second slot.

And all that would take would be — Collins’ words — “seven in a row, eight in a row.”

In theory, that is certainly doable, and in practice one of those contender-pretenders is certainly going to do as much in the 60 days between now and the final day of the season, Oct. 2. In theory, and in practice, that could be the Mets.

Except Tuesday night, despite the feel-good win (following Monday’s feel-awful loss), the Mets endured a 26th straight day in which they have failed to win consecutive games. Even accounting for the four days of the All-Star break when they didn’t play at all, that’s a staggering period of relentless under — make that non — achievement.

The Braves have had two two-game winning streaks in that time, and they’re officially in the tuck position. The Twins, the other zinc standard for lousy baseball in 2016, have gone back-to-back five times in that stretch, and in fact brought a two-game win streak into their game in Cleveland Tuesday. Even Cincinnati — the Siberia from which Bruce was rescued — has won consecutive games three different times since July 7.

You get the idea. Before waiting for the seven- or eight-game win streak to kick in, it would be wise to start with something a little more modest. A crawl before the walk before the run.

The Mets did the right thing trying to reinforce themselves at the deadline; their history is their history, and it screams that, as Steve Winwood once counseled, While you see a chance, take it.

But as he also warned a few lines later: it’s all on you. It’s on the Mets now to justify their self-belief this is a season worth saving. And sooner or later, that has to start with something more than just another one-game winning streak.